[wp-testers] Paste as Plain Text?

Andrew Ozz admin at laptoptips.ca
Thu Mar 27 21:20:01 GMT 2008


Daniel Schoonover wrote:
> So let me get this straight.  The way it was working before RC2 (the same
> way it worked in 2.3.3 was wrong?  That way seemed to work better, I would
> usually get the format to carry over to my pasting in my blog.  Now I have
> to reformat things whenever I paste into the visual editor.  It makes no
> sense we you would make a user have to do a command twice to input text.

Not exactly. In 2.3.3 when pressing Ctrl+V the "Paste as plain text" 
popup opens too. Basically there are 4 different ways of pasting: using 
the "Paste as plain text" popup, using the "Paste from Word" popup, 
right-click -> paste (unfiltered), and pasting in "HTML" mode.

The main problem is that most browsers don't support the onPaste event, 
so cleanup cannot be performed automatically. This cleanup is essential 
as different browsers handle the clipboard differently and insert 
different elements when copying html.

For example Safari inserts the styles from the stylesheet(s) attached to 
the page you're copying from as inline css and adds extra spans and 
sometimes divs. This usually results in 2-3 lines of inline css for each 
element and there may be hundreds of elements in the clipboard. Also it 
breaks the display with most WordPress themes. TinyMCE tries to correct 
this by removing any inline css when using Safari.

If you are knowledgeable about html and css, you probably can go to 
"HTML" mode and fix it, but it's bigger hassle and most users cannot do 
it anyway.

> Also I am experiencing some type of issue where once I did do the plain text
> paste and then hit "Insert" the text that is show in my visual editor would
> basically be locked, ie.  I could delete any of it.  I could change formate
> (bold,underline,etc) but no editing of the words themselves.

I can't reproduce this. Which browser/os are you using?

> Lastly when you are typing a post, there is no Cancel button, there is
> Preview, Save, and Publish, but no link for Cancel (people sometimes change
> their mind).  The novice user may get frustrated that there is no button for
> it but there is for all the other options.  You and I may know we can just
> leave the page and will get prompted with a Info box, but once again this
> seems to be counter productive of just having a Cancel button (I realize
> 2.3.3 didn't have cancel either, just always seemed weird, so I decided to
> mention it now).

What would the Cancel button do? Remove all content from the editor? 
Unpublish the post if published or perhaps delete it altogether? Also 
there's the "Manage Posts" page for that.



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